LOL. Previously you posted that the knowledge of a subject is not important for an editor and just the editing knowledge is important. Therefore, according to you, people who have no education, knowledge or interest in a subject will start finding sites that are good and make a judgment on the suitability of a site to be listed in order to build categories. If DMOZ was a university, they would have physics professors teaching cooking classes and chefs teaching quantum physics.
Yay! Well said. The people that had editing privileges "above" my category levels (even then they were very, very few) had ZERO knowledge of the internet landscape I oversaw, and was involved in, both online and in person. I haven't edited in nearly 2 years, and no one has touched my old categories since. You can bet that no one is "category-building" - they don't know what to look for. If they are to ever update these categories in any way, they'll mine the submission queue before they google for unlisted sites.
One thing that you forget to mentions is why should looking in Google be better than looking in submission line. If you are not an expert in the subject and can not make a judgment about the quality of a site, the only thing that being in the first page of the Google search proves is the fact that the owner of the site is very good in SEO. Why the hell do they even need to list a site which has such good placement in Google since users can easily find it in Google and don't need to look for it in DMOZ. Isn't the idea of category directory to help people to find more specialized and hard to find web sites that are specific to that subject?
Lucky you, my submission queues were usually empty so I had to actually go and search for so-called "competitors" just to get my edit counts up. After seeing your photo in profile that sounds really painful.
I've read your interesting comments guys, thanks. My personal opinion is that a person should not be an editor of a section if you have entries of affiliated sites in that section. This avoids any conflict of interest and allows you to be the benefactor that we know you are for the good of mankind. Now I've read the DMOZ rules and have a few questions. It says quite conspicuously in the site submission rules: Identify the single best category for your site. The Open Directory has an enormous array of subjects to choose from. You should submit a site to the single most relevant category. Sites submitted to inappropriate or unrelated categories may be rejected or removed. Now I don't want my listing to be removed -- it now seems it appears visible in the "forums" category which is listed alphabetically. I've noticed that his site - which contains similar content and layout, has five entries, including a prominent listing under legal information. His site has entries for directories - which mine has too. I'm wondering if I can submit my site for these multiple listings as well. Additionally and I can't say this has anything to do with an editor, my site doesn't come up under any search on the directory, e.g. TheLaw, TheLaw.com, etc. Perhaps this has to do with caching as well.
Added many which were impossible to find in Google unless you knew exactly what to look for. So instead of having categories up to date it is better to add them to list of thousands of other categories which nobody maintains and are hopelessly outdated just to avoid any possibility of Conflict of Interest? No wonder whole thing is going down with that attitude! And you're the guy who is claming that corruption isn't big of a problem DMOZ??? I agree paranoia and total lack of trust is! Because that is called Conflict of Interests and we can't have any of that!
IF you care to be considerate, and value the "common good." Selfishly, submit to as many categories you think might be relevant. It increases your chances of falling upon an editor that's at least half-asleep. Thelaw, the editor you speak of might over-list his own sites, but you are lucky there is someone editing at all in your category. Keep in mind that a DMOZ link yields virtually no traffic, and its effect on rankings is too small to be measured. He may think there is a benefit to him, but he is sadly mistaken. Don't worry about it. I was in a fabulous position to know of these sites that were buried in the SERPs. Over time, I've become a kind of "hub person" in my area. Sometimes, I would know of sites that people were working on, before they were online. I would list them within 48 hours of their sites going live. I know apply the knowledge of my topic webscape to Google Co-Op.
Agree. Pick the best and suitable while delete all crap and spam. Editors who says that its not don't care and are not doing lapses in the submission pool. Why then they say to submit to the best and suitable category ? Weird.
LOL back gworld. Let's see, you want to remove corruption but want categories looked after by people with vested interests in them. Do Yahoo customer care people have to be subject editors when they review a site for a customer?
You got to define "vested interest." I'll give myself as an example. I had 3 sites that fell under the umbrella of my main topic area. I listed all three. I also listed about 11,000 more sites. My so-called vested interest covered but a tiny area in the vast craft category I oversaw. The few times I was called upon to work in categories I didn't know anything about, I put on my submission processor cap. Of course, people that are interested in the widget category, and know about DMOZ at all, are webmasters. They probably have a widget website already. Unless we're talking about spammy categories like /Viaga or /Casinos, it's a GOOD idea for the editor to know a thing or two about its topical webscape. But this argument is thoretical, and based on the fanciful assumption DMOZ is seen by anything but editors, fretful webmasters checking if they are listed, and lonely bots and spiders.
Oh please, Michael. You have an obscure forum to which I posted valid comments. The posts were to inquiries which you, yourself, were either unwilling or unable to answer, or to misleading posts you had allowed to stand. And you're really not complaining about the content of the posts themselves, but about a signature, far more subdued than most in this thread and, for that matter, many on your forum. Go figure - it's also far more subdued than the self-promoting logo you use here. I will note that you didn't PM me about this on your forum. You didn't email me. You chose instead to "go public" with a set of misrepresentations. Let's review some of the responses to my comments by the people to whom they were directed: "Thanks for your reply"; "Thanks again aaronl. I appreciate your help"; "Thanks for the explanation"; "Thanks for getting back to me...". Oh, the horror... Yeah... Like most metas I've been accused of abuse pretty much since the day I was made a meta, and have had all of the links to my sites flyspecked for years. But I have never noticed the limitations of DMOZ. Instead I sit around sucking my toes, imagining that any day now I'll see billions of visitors flood to my site.
Ya I agree to you people there are lots of sites which I have noticed are not quality but still they have made it into the Directory but still there are thousands of quality sites waiting out there who are not even being reviewed. Strange isn't it.
And you were able to perform that role quite satisfactorily. No doubt if things had panned out differently and you had become an editall you would by now have clocked up edits across the board. Demonstrating that expert subject knowledge is a bonus but not necessary. Fact is that the vast majority of editors can edit even within areas where they have competitors and remain totally objective. The arguments about needing to be a subject expert to edit effectively are the same ones used for years to tell editors with a problem over Adult image galleries to butt out. The we are the experts, we know best how to list sites in our area of expertise syndrome. That turned out really well didn't it.
Any area which can brining more cash then nickels will suffer problems, just one more reason to "split" problematic categories from the rest so normal ones can be given much more editorial freedom instead of entire directory suffering from paranoia and witch hunts syndromes which has effectively killed it since nobody wants to bother editing some niche categories with all "security clearances" he has to pass just to become editor and move from one category to the next one.
Not only paranoia and security clearances. There are a lot of editors that are qualified for promotion but since they are not body part kissers they get left behind. Then you don't speak english like some do, you'll never make it to promotion. Then there is this smokescreening like you never agree with DMOZ but on the other hand defending it constantly. People know. Even a 12 grade student in my area said What a crock of a 2 face lying maniac. Its always typical to defend falling empires. Its just history repeating itself.
I guess I am talking to Aaron. It seems you've used whois and prefer adressing each other by first names. I'm rather shocked at the incredibly rude and arrogant nature of your post, complete with a barrage of insults. I don't and won't get into a flaming war with you. At least I treated this in a dignified and respectful fashion. I didn't demean or denigrate you or your forums. If my forum was so obscure then you wouldn't have bothered posting over a dozen times. Additionally, your forums are not much larger than mine (and perhaps we now know how you got there.) Your statement implies to me that if you deem someone else's site "obscure" or of no value, you have a license to do whatever you want. The fact that you've chosen to provide yourself TWO hyperlinks in the signature of every post on my forums tells everyone just how full of yourself you are, unfortunately. Please don't insult my intelligence or the DigitalPoint community's either. We know what search engines are and that the real promoter is the one who puts indexable links everywhere - including using the best keywords in the anchor text. Trying to complain about my little, unindexable avatar shows yet more defensive conduct, designed to deflect attention from yourself. You knew exactly what you were doing at my forums. I had respect for yours. Ah, so you are in the "brotherhood of fellow metas." Nobody accused you of anything. You've just failed to answer any of my valid, legitimate questions about the listings and about the policies of DMOZ, nor about the number of listings there. You've got FOUR more than one -- and you've ignored that important question. I planned to get a little more information here about policies before I approached someone who could be responsible for my listings appearing or not appearing. I wasn't one of the accusers of wrongdoing and I didn't know what to make of the events that had gone on and inquired politely. It seems that I touched a very sensitive nerve -- perhaps your outburst and insults are revealing about the nature of your conduct.
You chose not to tell the truth, I confronted you on it, and your feelings are hurt? Cry me a river. Your name is all over your website, by the way, along with links to a non-existent law firm site. I'm surprised you aren't aware of that. Hardly. When you are in the position of confronting abusive submitters, abusive editors and habitual liars, you have to expect that some of the muck will occasionally splash back on you when you try to scrape it off of your shoe.